Music education b the nirriculuriisung) is abstract because intangible. The reverse is of course the truth;
the concrete is the actual stuff of music, and for the child it is composed
of all the tunes he hears and tries to reproduce during the first few
years of his life. In a peasant community this constitutes an entire mu-
sical culture which the children inherit with their mother tongue; in
our modern urbanized communities the tradition is less secure. The
safest pattern for the teacher of young children is a musical home with
its daily opportunities of hearing music (much of it traditional) and of
joining in with singing, playing, and bodily movement. What is surely
to be avoided is the premature teaching of abstractions, such as the
major scale or isolated rhythmic units, accompanied by the visual sym-
bols of those abstractions, however attractively it may be possible to
present them in the guise of fairy stories and the like.
Many teachers have discovered the value of certain aural devices
in beginning the processes of abstraction and formulation. Those we
use most frequently in England are the solmization syllables founded
on those of Guido d’Arezao but modified into the so-called ‘sol-fa’
system by John Curwen in the nineteenth century, and the time names
of the Galin-Paris-Cheve system. Unfortunately, far too small a pro-
portion not only of our non-specialist but also of our specialist music
teachers really understands the function and purpose of these devices
and knows how to use them effectively; and musical education in
schools has suffered a great deal from the presentation of sol-fa syl-
lables and time names in an unimaginative way, divorced from any
musical context and without aesthetic significance.
The skill of singing and playing from musical notation can easily
be acquired if there has been adequate aural preparation through the
earlier years of childhood. When the time comes to introduce visual
symbols it is important to keep practical aims in view. There is no value
in teaching a large number of symbols that are not going to be used
frequently in the course of the children’s singing and playing; and it
must be part of the specialist’s psychological equipment to be able to
decide not how much can be taught, but how much can be omitted
at a given stage. For example, our complicated system of time-signa-
tures, though it may amuse an able class, is not essential to practical
reading skill in its early stages, and time spent in expounding it must
be deducted from the time available for practising the skill itself.
The teacher cannot afford to let himself forget that notation is only
the servant of musical creation and interpretation; and while his pupils
are gaining facility in reading notation he will continue to make their
direct musical experience his chief concern. He will be leading them